by Laura Lanni
Eddie stops the car at a red light and gives his face a rough rub before he turns all the way around in his seat and meets Joey’s eyes. “She’s gone, honey. Mom can’t come home.”
He considers how much truth to tell our little boy and weighs the value of a compassionate lie. “When somebody dies, they don’t come home anymore.”
There’s a loud beep. Eddie is sobbing again. Joey says, “Light’s green, Dad.”
At home, Eddie gives Joey a peanut butter sandwich for dinner while he calls my two women: our daughter, Bethany, and my sister, Michelle. Every time he says I’m dead, it smacks me all over again. After he tucks Joey in bed, he sits in the blue chair and stares at the black night out the window. Joey watches him from the stairs for a long time.
| | | |
The sun peeks under the curtains the next morning and warms a patch of rug beside Joey’s bed. The room smells like Oreos. The only sound is snoring, and it comes from under the bed. Of course, he’s under there. Whenever he was sad or scared, I told Joey to go there, and I promised to always find him and protect him. I can’t even hug him from my fresh post on the dead side.
I never had time during my life—between work and cooking and laundry—to do this, so I snuggle down beside him and watch my boy snooze until he stirs and rubs his sleepy eyes. After a gigantic yawn he shoves his fingers up his nose and commences what must be his daily ritual of digging. I remember the day, after years of harassing him about this disgusting male habit, when my son took a stand. Rather than issuing his blatant daily fib of promising to never pick his nose again, he said, “But Mommy, if I’m not supposed to pick out the boogies, why does my finger fit so good?” At five years of age, the kid had used evolution and his father’s tone, spot on, to shut down his mother’s nagging.
Now, with those boogie-covered fingers, Joey reaches into the cookie wrapper and pops one into his mouth. He’s as stubborn as I ever was. He won’t cry. He’ll wait for me under that bed indefinitely.
Or until the cookies run out.
He doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t know how I got here. I’m just dead and wandering, and, somehow, I can hear my little boy’s thoughts.
Yesterday morning Mommy got mad at Daddy. She never came home last night. She must be really mad about the Oreos.
But I’m not mad at you, Joey.
Me and Daddy almost tricked Mom. But she always figures stuff out, and we got caught.
Joey sneaks his hand out from under the bed and rubs the soft spot of rug warmed by the morning sun. After spending the whole night under the bed, he has no plans to emerge today. His stash of Oreos and Ritz crackers makes him thirsty, and he has to pee. But he waits. He hears a car on the gravel driveway.
Maybe it’s Mommy.
Bethany fumbles at the back door. Our daughter, as always, is carrying too much—her giant purse, some groceries, and our cat, Stink.
I watched her drive home from college last night. Once Joey was settled in his nest of blankets, I sought Bethany and immediately, by some inexplicable scramble of space and time, I was riding with her, right beside her in her car, for two hours on the deserted highway. One hundred and twenty minutes of watching my daughter hold her breath, clench the wheel. Seventy-two hundred seconds during which I could not hug her and make her feel better. Just like so many times during my life, I couldn’t ease my daughter’s pain. Eddie shouldn’t have let her drive home. He should’ve gone to get her. He shouldn’t have told Joey about me in the car. So many should’ves. None of them matter. Toss the should’ves in with the ifs and let them rot.
Bethany tiptoed into our house after midnight. She covered her dad with an old quilt, slid a flashlight and a half pack of Oreos under the bed with Joey, and sat awake almost all night. I stayed beside her the best I could, given my lack of a body. Like everyone else, she didn’t know I was there. When the sun woke her up this morning, she snuck out of the house and went to the grocery store. The living need to eat.
Bethany drops the cat in his favorite chair by the window, and, as she dumps the grocery bag on the table, I can suddenly hear her.
How many times will this happen? I can distract myself and push down the ache, but then it hits me all over again. Fresh. Like a train I forgot I was trying to outrun. The engine carries the news: your mother is dead. I forget to leap off the tracks. Slam. Pierces me like flying glass.
My mother is dead.
Oh, honey. I’m right here.
A groan from the lump in the blue chair pulls Bethany back out of her head. She kisses her dad’s cheek and crawls into his lap like she did when she was small. He wraps his arms around her, and he sobs. Bethany lets him cry into her hair. Her eyes are dry. Her mind is closed. It provides no further glimpse of her thoughts, no more inkling of her pain.
The ring of the phone pierces our silent home. Joey charges out of his room and yells, “Is it Mommy?” Bethany climbs off Eddie’s lap to answer it. She shakes her head at Joey. When she hangs up, she crumples to the cold tile floor in the foyer and pulls my lost boy into a hug. Joey remains rigid, but his sister isn’t lacking in the stubborn gene. She won’t let him go.
Finally, Joey puts his head on her shoulder. Her hair smells like mine. He turns his face into her neck and cries.
Mommy! Mommy!
My children are calling for me, and I am helpless, stuck. Though I know I’m the dead one, I feel as though my entire family has died. Maybe it doesn’t matter who dies—the separation and pain are the same. I’m separated from my family by a force beyond my control. I’m right here beside them, but without my body I’m light years away.
I am not fond of death so far.
4
Falling Apart
The light of the bright fall afternoon shines through the windows at the back of our house and glances off Bethany’s glasses as she peels apples, slowly, each in one long coil. She mixes butter with flour, not gently. Clouds of the white dust waft around my kitchen. Eventually, each speck succumbs to gravity, settling upon any horizontal surface that will stop its fall and convert kinetic back to potential energy.
My daughter is the only functioning body in the place. The cat sleeps on the heating vent with his long, bushy tail shielding the day from his eyes. Joey must be under his bed again. Eddie hasn’t moved from the blue chair yet. The stubble on his chin is graying. I imagine his breath is deadly. He is pathetic. I should feel sympathy for him because he looks like he could use a hug. But I don’t. I can’t yet because I don’t understand his reaction to my death. I wish I could have hugged him and made him smile more while I was alive, but we squandered our time together. Regrets overwhelm me.
I watch my Eddie frown when he smells the apples and cinnamon from the kitchen. I know he’s thinking about me, about us. I try to stay away, but he pulls me into his thoughts with the same magnetic intensity as when he pulled me into his arms thousands of times, still never enough, when I lived.
Anna?
Cinnamon reminds me of you. I can’t go into the kitchen. With both of his large hands, he rubs his face hard and blows out his breath. You were so sexy in there.
Shut up, Eddie.
I mean I was nuts about you when you cooked things I loved, just for me. Just for me, Anna.
The man is still a jerk. He throws around the L-word for food. So nonchalant.
That’s when I knew you loved me back.
Eddie’s the one who said we didn’t need the L-word. We didn’t need to say it. Could he give me a sign he loved me back?
Feeding me was how you showed me, for sure, that you were still mine.
Still yours? You didn’t even want me around.
I was so shook up when your cooking ability began leaking out. Remember? That’s what you called it—leaking.
I remember that day last spring when I made those apple squares, and I burned them to a crisp. I had the oven set too hot and forgot to set the timer. I got distracted.
I found you sitting on the kitchen counter drippin
g salty tears. The whole house smelled like scorched caramel, but the cinnamon still smelled incredible.
Cinnamon has a high thermal stability. Sugar decomposes first. Eddie came in covered in mud from digging a drainage ditch in the rain. He had that little-boy grin and that expectant look in his eye, the one that says he’s hunting cookies.
There wasn’t much I could do except eat all the nasty, charred things and keep telling you they were great—that I liked them better that way.
What a rotten liar. But he made me laugh.
I couldn’t tell you the real reason you were leaking because I wasn’t even supposed to know.
What did you know?
That’s when you told me you thought you had Alzheimer’s. It became our standard joke to explain away your absentmindedness.
He told me if I had it, I would be the last, not the first, to know. Always so logical.
You came over for a hug, so I danced you around the kitchen and you cried some more.
He teased me to make me smile. He said, “If your cooking skills are going, there’s only one thing left for us to do.”
We had one of our cryptic conversations about sex. Anna, you were always a trooper. You snorted and laughed through your tears when I said I hoped you didn’t forget how to do everything I liked.
He asked how much longer his favorite thing was going to last. The man could be funny when he gave it some effort.
You wiped your wet face on the front of my shirt and grinned and said, “Eh, maybe a year. Fifteen months, tops. Then you’ll have to find someone else.” Sarcasm is my friend. She used to be my wife.
I used to be his wife.
No. I’m done here. This hurts too much. I don’t have the strength to wallow in Eddie’s thoughts. I can’t let him pull me back in, the bastard. He’s sad and misses me now, but he was an unforgivable ass the last months of my life.
Just run away. That always worked for me in life. Don’t look at Eddie crying. Let me out of his head. I couldn’t face our problems while I was alive, and I still don’t want to because it hurts too much. My life unraveled at the end, and I couldn’t find my way back to the good times. I couldn’t find the source of the problem, so I blamed myself and hated my best friend, wondering how we got stuck so far apart, taunted by memories of how good we used to be.
| | | |
On a late summer morning just three months before I died, I awoke without a care in my head because my life was quite sweet before it started to rot. It was our anniversary, and Eddie’s forehead rested against the middle of my back right between my shoulder blades. He snored like a bear, unaware that we were touching and that in his sleep he’d crossed the imaginary line down the center of our bed that marked territory. My pillows, soft and deep, lay beside his firm, unyielding foam ones. The stiff sheet, which I always hated, was crumpled at the foot of the bed under the comforter on my side. It wasn’t yet dawn. My coffee pot would soon gurgle to life. I fought down my brain’s insistent to-do list and tried to slide back into sleep. That’s when Eddie’s breath shifted perceptibly, and then he lazily stifled a yawn.
I scooted back into his lap, and his arm came around me; his hand rested on my chest, his fingers brushed my throat. Under the comforting weight of his arm, I synced my breathing to his and fell back to sleep. An hour later the coffee pot did its morning spit-spit. The sound woke me just before the molecules delighted my nose.
Eddie’s sleepy voice asked, “Want a cup in bed?” His head still rested against my back.
“Yeah, thanks.” I rolled into the puddle of his sleep spot and purred when he vacated the bed. I stretched and grinned while I watched Eddie try to tiptoe as he limped on his sore runner’s ankles into the kitchen. Smug. That’s how I felt at the start of that day. Twenty-two years together. Two elevens. We were still together. Still strong.
Eddie came back with steaming mugs and the newspaper. “This is all I got you for our anniversary. Read quick. The boy will be up soon.” That’s how we did anniversaries—we blew past them. Even Valentine’s Day was ignored. On February fifteenth every year we went to the pharmacy together and brought home the orphaned, half-priced chocolates.
“I know. God, I miss Bethany.” Our daughter had started college a week before, and our house was eerily still without the tremors of her mood swings. I dug through the paper to find the crossword. I could read later, but if our kindergartener woke too soon and heard the newspaper crackle, he’d want to help, and he just didn’t understand that the letters had to spell actual and very specific words. “Joey can get his own cereal now, you know.”
“Really? I bet he spills all over the kitchen.” Eddie crawled under the covers and nudged me back to the middle of the bed. “I miss Bethany, too, but it sure is more peaceful without all her drama.”
“Don’t make me feel guilty, Ed.” I folded the paper into a precise rectangle of blank crossword, leaned back against him, and tapped the pen on my chin. “Joey got his own breakfast by himself last week. I found a bowl when I cleaned under his bed fort. It still had a skim of milk in it. Ready?”
I felt his chin bump my shoulder when he nodded. “Yep. Go.”
“One across: Phil of Genesis.”
“How many letters?”
“Seven.”
“Collins.” He rubbed the back of my neck. “How does he pour the milk?”
“I put it in a cup for him before I go to bed and leave it on the bottom shelf in the fridge. Two down, four letters: cookie, starts with O.”
“Uh oh. Anna, I drank that milk last night. Oreo. Are you sure Joey’s having cereal and not cookies?” he asked with a snort.
“Very funny, Eddie. He wouldn’t dare.”
Eddie kissed the side of my neck between slurps of coffee, leaving a trail of sticky. “Yeah, he would. One down is clap because eight across is Aesop, and four down is loo.” He kissed me some more, slowly yet greedily, on my shoulder and between my shoulder blades. He breathed in my ear like he used to on the rose path back when he had broad shoulders and forearms muscled like Popeye. And hair. I smiled.
“Thanks.” I wrote these in without even bothering to read the clues. “Let me get some, will you, Ed?” I took a long swallow of my sweet coffee and turned the paper away from his view.
“I’ll let you get some.” He unbuttoned my nightgown and whispered, “I bet your boy is in the cookies right now. Let’s risk it, though. It’ll give us a few more minutes.” His husky voice in my ear said, “Alone.”
“To finish the puzzle?” I asked. I met his eyes and felt our link through all of the fibers and cells, nerves, and capillaries of my body. For two decades, my life was balanced and anchored by this man. He was my friend, partner, and essential other half. He got me now, just like he had on our first date, when he knew our future before I even knew I liked him enough for a second date.
He laughed at me and said, “Yeah. Of course. The puzzle. Three across is ...”
“Shut up, will you?” I whacked him with the paper as he tackled me.
Later, I told him I was relieved that Joey was starting to do things on his own.
“School starts in a few weeks. Then, you know how the fall always is—crazy busy. It’ll be good for him and me if he becomes more independent and less reliant on me for everything. I won’t be around forever and for everything. He needs to learn that.”
And in that little instant, Eddie looked stricken. What did I say? Why did Joey growing up bother him so?
His affectionate playfulness evaporated. Eddie pulled away from me, and I didn’t live long enough for him to come back this time. His funk slammed back in on our anniversary, knocking me flat, and it sealed my best friend in an untouchable gloom. It lanced my heart to have him so close and lose him to the vacuum while I waited in limbo, leaving him all the power to choose us again.
Eddie left me alone, lonely and sad, and wondering when the hell he’d make his way back. Was this my fault? Could I have prevented the crack from widening? The same
worries that kept me awake, sweating, eye twitching, and desperate at the end of my life have tagged along to the dead side.
That’s enough. I will not waste any more energy worrying about Eddie. He’s not my problem anymore.
| | | |
Enticed by the good smells from the kitchen, Joey creeps down the stairs and climbs up on the step stool. He leans to Bethany for a hug. She starts to cry when she hugs him back. She sits him in a pile of flour on the counter. Joey is alarmed by her tears; now that his sister has started to cry, she can’t seem to stop. She wipes her face on the belly of his shirt and gives him an apple slice slathered in sugar and cinnamon.
He takes in the mess of flour and butter she’s concocting and asks shyly, “Apple squares?” He pops the chunk of apple into his mouth.
Bethany nods as she wipes her nose on her sleeve and eats a slice, too. Joey thinks he can help her stop crying. He says with a full mouth, “Hey, Bethy, hold your tongue and say apple.” He shines his wicked grin on her.
Bethany sticks out her tongue and holds it and says, “Athole,” and Joey loses himself in giggles. Eddie hears the sound from the other room, and we both think at the same instant: My children are laughing?
Now, I have left them all. It was not my intention, and I am infinitely pissed. Given a second chance at that choice, now I would have stayed home on Friday, November eleventh. I would’ve tried harder to stay on the same team as Eddie to keep us from falling apart.
As I watch my children, I feel like they are holding my heart.
Death really hurts.
5
Advice and Kissing Lessons
On the dead side, once again I have lost all control of my position in both space and time. I feel a twinge of the guilty relief that colored the end of my life. This much has not changed—it is still too painful for me to be in my own home. I’m grateful for another flashback.